Hutch Harris of the Thermals

Welcome to 5-10-15-20, a new feature in Pitchfork News. In 5-10-15-20, we talk to artists about the music they loved at five-year interval points in their lives. Maybe we'll get a detailed roadmap of how their tastes and passions helped make them who they are. Maybe we'll just learn that they really liked hearing the "Karate Kat" theme song over and over when they were kids. Either way, it'll be fun.

My dad is a professional piano player. He would always play around the house while I was growing up, and that was one of the first songs that he showed me and my sister when I was five and she was three. That song works well for kids because it's really upbeat and kind of non-sensical. Or the "ob-la-di" part is, at least. I don't remember much about being five. [laughs] At that age, all I was hearing was show tunes, all stuff that my dad was playing. I don't even know if I heard a record of this song until later.

I remember my uncle and aunt taking my sister and me to Wherehouse Music or some shit like that. It was the first time I ever bought a cassette. I must have been nine or 10. I remember my sister getting "Like a Virgin" and I got "The Heart of Rock & Roll". [laughs] [I just liked] that it was really square, maybe. I remember thinking that this band is really cool. Maybe I loved the saxophone.

My friend Mike Butler made me a mixtape when I was either 15 or 16 with "Bombshell". We had a band called Buncha Losers in high school. He was the drummer.

I love that song. One of the raddest things about that song is they set an alarm off like maybe halfway through. Or maybe it's kind of near the end, when they break down and everyone's just hitting their instruments. This alarm is just going all the way through the song. It's rad and abrasive.

That was my introduction to punk rock, and it was the classic story of one mixtape changing my life. Minor Threat was on there, Subhumans, probably stuff by Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth. I was living in San Jose, and Green Day were putting out their first records. Operation Ivy had just broken up and then put out that Energy LP. To me, that was massive.

By then, I was into a lot of indie rock and stuff. At that point, I was living with this band Duster. They were friends of mine from San Jose, and I was playing a little bit with them. They had turned me on to all the rad stuff that was coming up like Tortoise, Palace, and Eric's Trip, just like so much of the indie rock that came out in the second half of the 90s.

That same time was when Red Medicine came out. It was really cool to see Fugazi grow that way. They were definitely fitting in more with a lot of the stony shit that was going on at the time, like the bands I just mentioned and Yo La Tengo. It was really the record that made Fugazi sound like they were stoners, a little bit, like they had been smoking some weed. I just think "Target" is super tight. It's a killer song.

Kid A came out when I was 25. That was during this really dark winter. Kathy [Foster, Thermals bassist] and I had just broken up, and I moved out of the house we lived in. I was house-sitting for this group of guys who were out of town, so I was living all alone in this dark, cold house with no heat. But they had a really good stereo system. They had this really big sub-woofer, which was rad. So when I would put on Kid A and it was fucking really heavy.

The thing I love about Kid A is that the segues are all super tight. The flow of it is just rad. I remember for a while not knowing exactly where one song was starting and the other was ending, especially "In Limbo". The way that descending guitar line drops in after the previous song is just magic.

I was also listening to a lot of Velvet Underground at the same time, a lot of White Light/White Heat.

At 30, you're getting over some kind of hump, at least in punk rock. Rick Froberg's lyrics are always good, but there is this new cynicism in the song. I mean, "I Hate the Kids" [from 2002's Suicide Invoice], for him to be saying that after being worshipped in bands like Drive Like Jehu and Rocket From the Crypt, that's great. It can make people feel better about getting older.